Yi He

Through livestream channels, consumers gain more product information, which allows online retailers to engage with more consumers. However, online retailers may encounter challenges such as increased costs and the risk of free‐riding, leading to hesitation in adopting this emerging marketing strategy. This paper investigates the factors motivating online retailers’ decisions to introduce livestream channels in a competitive environment. The results reveal that when the differentiation between online retailers is relatively low, both tend to introduce livestream channels. With moderate differentiation, only one online retailer introduces livestream channel as the equilibrium strategy. When differentiation is high enough, neither online retailer introduces livestream channels. Notably, when both online retailers introduce livestream channels, they fall into a prisoner's dilemma. The study also extends the main model to consider the additional utility that consumers gain from viewing livestream, the impact of free‐riding behavior, and impulse purchases in livestream rooms. The main conclusions remain consistent across these extensions.

Consumer impulsive purchasing is very common, especially in the livestream selling where they are influenced by policies such as low prices, limited time, and limited quantity. This behavior can increase a firm's sales, but it also leads to higher return rates. Considering consumer impulse purchase, this paper conducts an analytical model to investigate the conditions for a firm to introduce a livestream channel and whether the firm should adopt a low or moderate livestream price strategy when introducing a livestream channel. Our results show that, when return processing cost is small enough, the firm benefits from the livestream strategies as long as the streamer's fan effect is larger than a threshold. Specifically, a firm prefers to adopt the low livestream price strategy when cooperating with a large fan effect streamer and a moderate livestream price strategy with a small fan effect streamer. However, when return processing cost is large, the low livestream price strategy cannot be the dominant strategy. Furthermore, we make several extensions (i.e., different impulse utility on different livestream price, impact of positive impulse utility of low impulsive consumers, different online return rates of different types of consumers, the costs of introducing the livestream channel, and consumer return processing cost) to verify the robustness of the model, and the main conclusions remain unchanged. These results provide guidance for firms on the introduction of livestream channel and pricing decisions of different channels.

Post-sale customer care (PSCC) outsourcing is an effective supply chain strategy to reduce costs, but traditional outsourcing methods cannot ensure consumers’ belief in PSCC quality, harming the firms’ competitive strategy. To ensure consumer satisfaction through transparency, this article examines evolving supply chain strategies of leveraging blockchain to outsource PSCC operations of competing manufacturers to third-party agents. Based on consumers’ beliefs and blockchain adoption cost, manufacturers have two choices; to outsource the PSCC operations with or without blockchain, resulting in multiple outsourcing strategies. Results show that the consumers’ belief in one manufacturer’s outsourcing strategy has detrimental effects on the stance of another manufacturer. Moreover, the blockchain cost and consumers’ beliefs dictate the manufacturers’ strategies for PSCC outsourcing, resulting in a ‘quadruple zone of strategic fit’, where both manufacturers adopt blockchain or neither adopt blockchain, or one adopts while the other does not. Interestingly, despite the low or zero blockchain cost, both manufacturers will outsource without blockchain if their traditional business models satisfy consumers. The extended analysis reveals contradictory results that manufacturers should outsource more often with blockchain to facilitate consumers when a long-term warranty is offered, or the product has a higher failure rate, even though, overall these factors increase costs.

Government subsidy is a common practice in poverty alleviation. We used game theory and the mathematical model of operations management to investigate the efficiency of subsidy with different poverty scales when the firm owns the decision power of the wholesale price. Comparative analysis of the equilibrium solutions demonstrated the following results: Exclusive subsidy has a significant effect on the payoff of the poor farmer, but the dilemma is that the increase in the payoff of the poor farmer is against the payoff decrease of the regular farmer. Sharing subsidy has a counterbalancing effect on the payoff of the poor and regular farmers. Co-subsidy is the best for consumer surplus and social welfare, but it has little effect on improving the poor farmer’s payoff. Generally, when the poor farmers are in the majority, sharing subsidies or co-subsidy is more reasonable than exclusive subsidy. When the poor farmers are in the minority, exclusive or sharing subsidies will be more economical for the government than co-subsidy. Our research helps the government recognize that spending more money may achieve a poor result in poverty alleviation and help the firm realize that it is better to give more subsidies to the poor farmer than to itself. The highlights of the paper are as follows. Firstly, our work provides a new perspective in supply chain operations management with poverty alleviation by considering the participation of the poor and regular farmers together; secondly, the poverty scale is introduced into the mathematical model; thirdly, we pay attention to the impact of government subsidy to enterprise on the payoff of the poor farmer.

Purpose: The confirmation of receipt of orders by consumers means that the online retailer actually receives the payments on many retail platforms (e.g. Taobao). In order to recoup funds as soon as possible, the retailer will take steps (e.g. improving the level of delivery and adopting a rebate policy) to encourage consumers to confirm receipt earlier. It is significant for the retailer to identify an appropriate strategy and determine the optimal product price. To address the above issues, this paper examines and compares the pricing strategies and profits under different strategies to show some managerial insights for the retailer's decision-making.Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the authors discuss four models, i.e. adopting common delivery and offering consumers no rebates, adopting common delivery and offering rebates, adopting fast delivery and offering no rebates and adopting fast delivery and offering rebates, which the retailer may consider. Under different models, consumer utility and firm's profit structure are disparate. After comparing the retailer's profits under four models, the optimal strategy, profit and product price are obtained.Findings: Some interesting results are as follows. When the cost of fast delivery is not very high, improving the level of delivery would bring more profit to the retailer and create a positive impact on consumers. Interestingly, our results also show that offering proper rebates to stimulate consumers to confirm receipt early only serves to improve the profit only when the motivation of consumers to confirm the receipt is very low. Moreover, the authors find that a higher level of delivery services can promote the implementation of the rebate policy to improve the retailer's earnings.Originality/value: This paper is the first study on the transaction mode of retail platforms and the problem of confirming receipt by a model-based method.

This study develops a game theory model to study the effects of the order‐online‐and‐dine‐in‐store (OODS) strategy on a restaurant's optimal decisions, expected profits, and the environment. We analyse and compare the equilibrium solutions under the benchmark and the online‐to‐offline scenario using the OODS strategy. The results show that the restaurant benefits from the OODS strategy when the operating costs of online channel and physical store are relatively low or when the unit carbon tax price of food packaging is relatively high. If the restaurant charges a high price, the OODS strategy will benefit the environment.

This paper considers a retail platform selling a product to consumers and voluntarily discloses product quality information by using blockchain technology (BCT). Consumers decide whether to deliberate before making purchase decisions. We develop an analytical model to explore the effects of information disclosure strategies on the retail platform’s pricing and consumers’ deliberation decisions. Some interesting results are obtained. First, regardless of the information disclosure strategy, consumers’ deliberation and purchasing decisions depend on the deliberation cost and product price. Consumers will only deliberate if the price is at the medium level and the deliberation cost is not too high. Second, when the disclosure cost is high, the retail platform either stimulates or prevents consumer deliberation; however, when the disclosure cost is at a medium interval, the retail platform’s pricing decision depends on its information disclosure strategy. Specifically, when disclosing quality information, the retail platform will implement the stimulated deliberation (SD) or prevented deliberation (PD) strategy and will never adopt the sold at a low price (SL) strategy; however, when quality information is withheld, the retail platform will only adopt the PD strategy. Third, we identify the conditions under which the retail platform should disclose quality information when facing different disclosure costs.

This study focuses on the value of the buy‐online‐and‐pickup‐in‐store (BOPS) option during online shopping carnivals. We develop a newsvendor model in which a retailer faces the risk of online order overload and provides consumers with a BOPS option. The optimal pricing and ordering decisions under the benchmark scenario and the omnichannel retailing scenario with the BOPS option are analyzed. The results demonstrate that after implementing the BOPS option, the retailer will maintain or lower the price instead of raising the price. In addition, we find that the fraction of BOPS consumers, the unit goodwill loss, and the retailer's best online service capacity play significant roles in the implementation of the BOPS option. We identify the condition under which the retailer can benefit from the BOPS option.